Shareconnector, Releases4u
p2pnet.net News Feature:- The hired FIOD-ECD guns weren’t enough. Brein still needs two court decisions to go after Shareconnector and Releases4u or better yet, shut down Ed2k and Bittorrent in Holland.
Raids on Ed2k and Bittorrent defined showed that a criminal suit was unattainable. Now, Brein is gearing up for a civil suit. But, small detail: it’s already lost one decision and wasn’t even a party in another.
Zoekmp3.nl (Techno Design vs Brein)
As Webwereld.nl reported on Tuesday, Brein definitely will appeal the Techno Design case it lost last year. The case primarily focused on the question if hyperlinks to mp3 files were infringing. The judge ruled the search engine site didn’t infringe on copyrights by indexing and presenting links to mp3 files.
The Judge main argument was (translation): “The only relevant activity Techno Designs undertakes, is presenting users of the search engine the web-address and place where files can be found”
Most scholars agreed with the decision, albeit with mixed views about the judge’s arguments.
Brein needs to have this decision overturned, otherwise it has a weak case against Shareconnector and Releases4u.
Despite the fact search engines such as Google or Zoekmp3.nl and forum sites aren’t alike, the fundamental of linking is still the same and the judge will assess mp3 link or ed2k link in the same way, I hope.
Lycos vs Pessers
Last year, ISP Lycos lost a case against Pessers – a stamp collector defamed on a Lycos hosted website – and was charged with handing over a user identity. Lycos appealed the decision, which was heavily criticized by most Dutch ISP’s as an unnecessary burden on them.
Last December, Webwereld reported that Brein is supporting Pessers in the appeals procedure. The deal almost didn’t go through when Pessers didn’t show up at the first appeals hearing.
Two big-time solicitors will argue on behalf of Pessers in front of the appeals court, hired and paid for by Brein.
Tim Kuik acknowledges: “we have a stake in this decision”.
Brein knows that it can’t keep on fooling the authorities into launching raids.
The Verdicts
Identity
As reported here, Europe isn’t happily handing over user’s ID to the Industry. The US is also apprehensive. A second US appeals court ruled on Tuesday (jan. 4th 2005) that the recording industry can’t force Internet providers to identify music downloaders under a disputed copyright law.
Linking, ed2k and torrents
As for the linking case; things aren’t open-and-shut. At p2pnet.net, there’s an interesting discussion on the law, hyperlinks, ed2k-links and torrent links.
Unfortunately, these discussions always focus on the technical definitions and compositions (uri’s, url’s trackers and torrents) and how the law and experts see it.
If you’ve been following the Kazaa case in Australia, you’ll have noticed that with even the best of experts on either side, it’s difficult for a judge to break it down into legal terms. Lawyers can spin everything in any direction.
I suspect the main focus will be on if webmasters and hosts knew, or could reasonably have known, that they were doing something illegal. And if so, can they be held responsible?
That’s were the “verified links” part comes in.
Napster taught us that centralized means you know, and could have done something about it. Kazaa teaches us that decentralized means, unable to know or check. But what role will “verified status” play in this case? Will the ’self cleansing’ users/community that verify links be the key in absolving or condemning webmasters and hosts?
Even though, tracker or forum sites act as “mere conduits” – a legal term used to absolve ISP and other information services – the link verification process may work against them. Brein head Tim Kuik hinted as much after the raids.
I just hope that these two cases and the Lokitorrent case gives us some answers.
Raymond Blijd – fk2w
January 6th, 2005 at 9:56 pm
great article, he’s good
January 7th, 2005 at 10:43 am
A good analogy to show that posting identifiers of copyrighted works on a website is perfectly legal (with or without knowledge of it) are barcodes (or: ASIN/ISBN codes).
Lets say you buy a DVD movie. It has a title, length and barcode on it.
Ask a judge whether posting these three pieces of information on a website (or catalogue) is legal. There is no doubt in my mind that it is because the only thing you do is to identify a (copyrighted) work. If this were illegal then companies like amazon would be violating copyright law.
An ed2k-link contains the same kind of information: title (filename), length (filesize), barcode (hash). These three kinds of information have exactly the same function: identification. If you were to put a couple of these ed2k-links and their corresponding title/length/barcodes on one piece of paper it would become perfectly clear there isn’t any real difference.
When however somebody says to you: “you can get a pirated DVD at that address” he is (most likely) breaking the law. So would you (most likely) be if you told somebody where to get a copyrighted file. But this a matter of localization not identification. Ed2k-links have nothing to do with localization.
While “normal” links point to (or resolve into) a single address (analogy: it gives you the streetname and number of a pirate) ed2k-links only give a description of a (copyrighted) work (analogy: the movie contains 321 scenes, 34 shots are fired and the total age in days of all the actors is 532489: id=32134532489).
Hope this helps.
Just my 2 cents…
PS. What would happen if Amazon would use hash-codes for their “Catalogue Numbers” of DVDs? In other words: is a hash copyrighted itself?
January 7th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
I think site/server and espeically filesharers should Refuse and resist until the swat team comes in guns blazing and the blooddy corpses of the site operators are shared up on the internet and later ends up on national tv and then let the riots begin!